NXTGEN

I gave my presentation here on Saturday morning – immediately after Lindy McKeown’s keynote. Between the two presentations we had several overlaps – not surprising considering the similarity of our work in Second Life.

Online Sites for Generative Play

This paper proposes an alternative concept for thinking about engagement in online environments as a form of “generative play”. The notion of “generative play” draws on existing forms of online role-play (MMORPG, Alternate Reality Games and persistent virtual worlds) and combines it with principles of process drama. The result is an emergent modality that reveals itself as a playful engagement that expects significant meaning-making without predetermined or prescribed content.

Using this model as a frame we can consider new approaches to creating educational drama forms which can comfortably draw together varying degrees of online and offline engagement. The frame of “generative play” can also accommodate the development of new performance paradigms that launch us into the world of networked performance.

After my presentation I sat in on Lindy’s session about Action Learning – given that I’m one her labrats I was an exhibit for her presentation.. later I helped out during Yvonne Harrison’s session on getting started in SL. It was a good day but the interest in SL seemed small.

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